Are Your Employees Engaged or Enraged?

If someone could give you a blueprint for how you could achieve greater profitability, wouldn’t it be worth at least a minimum investment in time?

Many studies have demonstrated that happy, engaged employees are the most valuable and profitable to any organization. Further, unhappy, unengaged employees can be unproductive, even destructive in some cases, and ultimately lead to costly turnover. I recently wrote an article on this with multiple examples of such studies ("The Business Case for Engaged Employees," June 15).

You may know that insideARM.com has launched its second annual Best Places to Work in Collections program. Amidst a barrage of negative publicity for the industry, we’d like to highlight those companies that are great corporate citizens, providing terrific places of employment. We know there are U.S. collection agencies, law firms, debt buyers, and creditor recovery operations of all sizes out there that care about their employees, provide top notch training, and have well-respected leaders. We want to find and recognize you!

The benefits to being named a “Best Place to Work” may be obvious: boost morale, attract top candidates (crucial in any job market), and demonstrate to clients and prospects that you have an engaged workforce, which is a competitive advantage not easily matched.

But I’d like to highlight how great the benefits are to participating in this (free) program, even if you don’t come out at the top of the list this time. It’s critical to know what your employees are thinking. Many will not tell you directly, for fear of consequences. Many may appear happy, but behind that front, are preparing to leave as soon as the economy turns around or they find a new job where they perceive the grass is greener. The only way to learn this is to obtain candid feedback – which you can only gather effectively through a 3rd party.

The insideARM.com Best Places to Work in Collections program is conducted by the Best Companies Group, a firm that conducts similar programs nationwide and has zero connection to the ARM industry. We at insideARM.com and Kaulkin Ginsberg do not receive the feedback or comments of any individual or any individual company. Participating companies also receive only aggregated feedback, in order to not jeopardize the confidentiality of any individual employee.

Kaulkin Ginsberg has participated twice in a local Best Places to Work in Greater Washington DC program. I will admit to you that we have not yet won, however the information we received has been invaluable to our management team. We have made many changes as a result of the responses, and our scores improved across the board from last year to this year. By the way, relative to the value of the information received, participation was incredibly easy and streamlined.

Conducting such a survey on your own could easily cost $5,000-$10,000.  Participation in this study is free, and you will receive an overview of the results for free.  In most cases, if you decide to purchase of the full results report, it costs less than $1,000, and you don’t have to decide to purchase until later.

It is well-documented that turnover of just one $50k salaried employee costs $75,000 – or 150 percent of base salary. Wouldn’t any of us spend less than $1,000 in order to save well over $75,000? Indeed, wouldn’t it be worth at least a minimum investment in time and money?

I welcome your comments, questions or concerns about this program. Email me at publisher@insidearm.com